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I’ve earned a good part of my life’s income to date taking other people’s C code, cleaning it up, making it work and then making it work better. In one sense the original program that this article is about is perfect, it takes the prescribed input, processes it and produces the desired output using the test set provided. That’s really all you can ask for in any program, under normal circumstances. Provided of course that the program produces its results in an acceptable time. What acceptable is is up to the user of such a program, in this particular case the writer of that article (linked at the end) used acceptable to mean ‘slower than Haskell’ and as a long time observer of the language wars this irks me.

My wife gave me a real geek book for Christmas: Masterminds of Programming by two guys named Federico Biancuzzi and Shane Warden. In it they interview the creators of 17 well-known or historically important programming languages. The book was a very good read, partly because not all the questions were about the languages themselves. The interviewers seemed very knowledgeable, and were able to spring-board from discussing the details of a language to talking about other software concepts that were important to its creator.

Interviewer: Yes, I understand that, but can you give me an idea of how much experience you have with brown? Roughly. Carpenter: Gosh, I really don't know. Once they're built I don't care what color they get painted. Maybe six months? Interviewer: Six months? Well, we were looking for someone with a lot more brown experience, but let me ask you some more questions. Carpenter: Well, OK, but paint is paint, you know...

Once again, flaws in Java are creating big holes that hackers exploit to victimize users and, even worse, sabotage or spy on many of the computers that run key business processes at utilities, banks, hospitals, and government agencies. Enough already. Wake up and smell the coffee: Client-side Java needs to go, and fast. Even if the current bugs can be fixed, there will be more.

Oh, the irony that an antimalware app requires the use of one of the biggest malware conduits to function!

I'm not sure this author knows anything about software, how is an OS supposed to stop Java from running? It's just a program like any other. It would be especially hard with Java, because I could, in theory, implement a JVM in another language like C# or Python, are they supposed to somehow recognize every possible implementation of the JVM that could ever exist? It just isn't feasible...

It was originally published to InfoWorld. I'm certain the author doesn't; and wouldn't be surprised if he has to hire someone to turn his computer on for him.

Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?--Zachris Topelius

Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.-- Sarah Hoyt

Ahmed Al-Khabaz, a 20-year-old computer science student at Dawson and a member of the school’s software development club, was working on a mobile app to allow students easier access to their college account when he and a colleague discovered what he describes as “sloppy coding” in the widely used Omnivox software.... “I felt I had a moral duty to bring it to the attention of the college and help to fix it, which I did. I could have easily hidden my identity behind a proxy. I chose not to because I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong.”

If this weren't so infuriating I'd make a "double secret probation" joke.

I'd like to see a response to that response. It didn't really say much, aside from a very general statement indicating that Ahmed was given a chance to avoid futher infraction (it was so general that it didn't refer to Ahmed's circumstances, but instead to the process that dictates expulsion).

Democracy has become a mock term. Too bad. This kid might well become a security adviser to a big firm or better may be CEO of a startup and in coming years can turn the college to his "ping pong room" ?

In addition to visual effects, I was asked to record myself using a unix terminal doing technologically feasible things. I took extra care in babysitting the elements through to final composite to ensure that the content would not be artistically altered beyond that feasibility. I take representing digital culture in film very seriously in lieu of having grown up in a world of very badly researched user interface greeble. I cringed during the part in Hackers (1995) when a screen saver with extruded "equations" is used to signify that the hacker has reached some sort of neural flow or ambiguous destination. I cringed for Swordfish and Jurassic Park as well. I cheered when Trinity in The Matrix used nmap and ssh (and so did you)....

Eeeew. I don't normally care about typography; but the font used in that article is horrid.

Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?--Zachris Topelius

Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.-- Sarah Hoyt

None of us are creating value all by ourselves. We’re doing it with other people. And these people – or, network using the more technical term – in our lives shape who we are (by influencing what you think about), and what we make (by helping us get things done). Yet, it’s only through trial and error that we figure out who to choose to work with, and who to avoid.

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore, Dream. Discover.

Everyone likes the idea of a cheat mode, or "God Mode." Many years ago - I think around 1993 - Doom introduced the idea of switching a player into God Mode within the game by typing IDDQD. You'd then be invincible and get to feel like you'd discovered an exciting secret "easter egg" in the game. How exciting the the developers hid this for us to find! You may have heard of a "God Mode" hidden in the depths of Windows 8 (or 7 for that matter)... and it "unlocks" a bunch of secret functionality. Let's try.

While all content is trending towards CSS and JavaScript, the core technologies of the browser, it seems a little weird to position EPUB as being a collection of things that do something different from what browsers do. The nuance might not be clear so here goes... EPUB is essentially a collection of standards wrapped up inside a zip file with a few extra bits that ‘bind’ the content together. The extra bits give metadata and information needed for books including a table of contents, etc. Most of the standards wrapped up by this zip file are standards made for, or predominantly made for, browsers.

Why the e-book standards wars are starting to feel increasinly like the old (ongoing) browser wars.

One of the toughest problems I faced when I built Notepad Classic was an issue where many functions like Go To & Find were always off a few characters. After a bit of experimenting I noticed a pattern, it was off by the number of characters equal to the line number (0 based).... It turned out that the way the string functions count a line break.